CollabNet have announced the purchase of SourceForge from VA Software in consideration for an equity stake in CollabNet.

This is a strategic purchase for CollabNet bringing two of the leading Collaborative software solutions into one company, the combined solutions have more than 1.1 million users worldwide.

“The market for globally distributed software development solutions is growing rapidly as the need for interconnected applications and software development teams has now become the norm,” said Bill Portelli, CEO of CollabNet. “With the addition of SourceForge Enterprise Edition business to CollabNet’s product portfolio and team, we have become the standard for this new method of performing decentralized development. Unlike conventional software development systems, CollabNet’s solutions are designed to promote and optimize the benefits of collaboration and distributed software development, based on open source principles. Our solutions provide two to 10 times the cost advantage and a 20 to 50 percent productivity improvement, as compared to legacy software development platforms.”

"SourceForge Enterprise Edition customers and VA Software employees will substantially benefit from this combination of the two leading collaborative development teams and solutions,” said Ali Jenab, CEO of VA Software. “With our equity ownership in CollabNet we demonstrate our continued belief that demand for quality collaborative software development solutions continues to grow. Going forward, our executive management team will be keenly focused on growing our core online media assets, comprised of SourceForge.net®, Slashdot.org, ITManagersJournal.com, NewsForge.com, Linux.com, freshmeat.net and ThinkGeek.com. Together, these sites attract over 32 million unique visitors a month."